Have used my Mondo card for a week now and loving it!
One feature that would be useful is comparative spending analytics against my peer group. I want to know if I’m spending more / less / same as others like me. And imagine I’d adjust my behaviour if it turns out I’m spending stupid amounts of money on cocktails / coffee…
These comparative peers groups could be:
My facebook friends (linking Mondo with facebook would be awesome for a whole lots of other reasons --> e.g. displaying spending densities on a map of London to see where all my friends are generally hanging out)
My demographic (age, education, etc.) and location
And the analytics that I’d like to see would be:
[How much…] spend vs. others, in aggregate and by category (e.g. how does my beer consumption compare to others?)
[and where…] recommendations on cafes / bars / restaurants that my (anonymised) friends visit frequently, and may be worth a visit. (this may also be worth monetising at a later date)
I would assume that spending habits are relative to income, so I’m struggling to see how comparing your expenditure to a friend on Facebook would be at all useful - not to mention the privacy implications. Would you mind explaining a little more?
I like the idea but I’m not behind the Facebook connection aspect at all. I don’t need to compare against my friends spending.
I can see some use in seeing how you compare against similar Mondo users. E.ON do that in comparing my energy usage against other similar houses based on a few questions. I can see there being scope for this once Mondo is a full bank with current accounts.
Obviously it would have to be opt in but I think it’s well worth keeping banking and Facebook separate.
Yeah, i would definitely would not want facebook to be linked to my finances. They have little respect for privacy concerns. But I would be ok with Mondo giving statistics showing average daily or monthly spending for people in age/location groups (eg 18-21) etc. You can then compare yourself with that data, but I would not like anything that compares individuals as that can cause a lot of trust issues.
Lots of great questions and points here! And nice to hear that people like the general idea.
Re: FB / Privacy: The data should be stored with Mondo and not Facebook. Facebook would only provide the network and links in order to figure out who is connected to whom. The analytics would have to occur on the Mondo side.
Re: sharing financial data: People are trending towards being more comfortable with sharing personal information in a way that was hard to imagine just 5 years ago. The privacy of finance is just the next wall to be broken down - especially if that information wasn’t individually identifiable, but aggregated / anonymised. It wasn’t so long ago that people were afraid of buying goods online…
Re: comparison groups: For me, my facebook friends ARE the best comparative group. From recollection, my facebook networked was clustered into 8 different social groups - mostly based on education/location/work. Would be great if I could pick one (perhaps based on education/work) to compare against. But really, wouldn’t want to get too scientific about it. After a while, you should be able to put enough smarts into an algorithm that simply creates the best comparison group - making it easy for lazy people like me to just know if I’m overspending based on other people like me.
Every time I think about this kind of stuff I always go back to the idea of sending feed items from the backend. Users could opt-in to be notified about their spending patterns and then receive nudges with small bits of information that they could act on: “people of your age, living on your area seem to spend much less in groceries… these are the supermarkets where they buy”, etc.
on Facebook would be at all useful - not to mention the privacy 
implications. Would you mind explaining a little more?